I’ve long been struck by one strange aspect of the most recent part of the American Century: just how demobilized this country has been in the midst of distant wars that have morphed and spread for almost 17 years. I was born in July 1944 into a fully mobilizedread more

Forget Emma Lazarus’s poetry and the Statue of Liberty; you really don’t want to be an immigrant in today’s America. As Dara Lind recently pointed out at Vox, being an immigrant or the child of one (even if you’re a U.S. citizen) now means livingread more

Early this February, the Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed new federal budget legislation that increased U.S. military spending by $165 billion over the next two years. Remarkably, though, a Gallup public opinion poll, conducted only days before, found that only 33 percent of Americans favored increasing U.S. military spending, while 65 percent opposed it, either backing reductions (34 percent) or maintenance of the status quo (31 percent).

On March 1, 2018, I was very privileged to take part in a discussion of issues of racism, freedom of speech, patriotism, and war at Saint Mary’s Hall, a private high school in San Antonio “Military City USA” Texas.

I was one of five speakers who had been invited to speak about issues we had raised related to take-a-knee protests. The videos are all here, including video of all theread more

I’m no fan of police states or of dictators, whether in Russia, China, North Korea or under development here in the United States, but let’s at least be honest about what’s behind the news that President Trump has agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the man he has been calling “fat” and “Little Rocket Man.”

The corporate media in the US has been lavishing at times grudging praise onread more

Here’s a thoroughly humdrum figure from the post-9/11 world: this February an estimated 1,294 people were killed in Iraq and another 266 wounded, including ISIS militants, numerous civilians, Iraqi security forces, Kurds, and Turks. Few of them died in major combat, justread more

After experiencing a terrifying attack on their school by a tragically unhinged former student armed with an assault-style rifle who killed 14 of their classmates and three teachers and seriously injured another 14, they didn’t retreat into fear and victimhood. Insteadread more